Collective pitch feedforward control of floating wind turbines using lidar

Abstract

In this work a collective pitch feedforward controller for floating wind turbines is presented. The feedforward controller provides a pitch rate update to a conventional feedback controller based on a wind speed preview. The controller is designed similar to the one for onshore turbines, which has proven its capability to improve wind turbine control performance in field tests. In a first design step, perfect wind preview and a calm sea is assumed. Under these assumptions the feedforward controller is able to compensate almost perfectly the effect of changing wind speed to the rotor speed of a full nonlinear model over the entire full load region. In a second step, a nacelle-based lidar is simulated scanning the same wind field which is used also for the aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation. With model-based wind field reconstruction methods, the rotor effective wind speed is estimated from the raw lidar data and is used in the feedforward controller after filtering out the uncorrelated frequencies. Simulation results show that even with a more realistic wind preview, the feedforward controller is able to significantly reduce rotor speed and power variations. Furthermore, structural loads on the tower, rotor shaft, and blades are decreased. A comparison to a theoretical investigation shows that the reduction in rotor speed regulation is close to the optimum.